Beater heaven.
I lived in Chicago for three years in the 80s, watching a moderate amount of television. Never saw that ad.
Yep. Of you needed it, they had it.
The end of an era, for sure.
L
I drove past it daily for a couple of years. The parking lot was a layer of oily dirt over gravel.
If you watched any really crappy programs in the Chicagoland area back in the day, you couldn’t help but see the commercial with some poor wretch losing the door on his beater as he tried to get into it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH95UTtbmr8&t=7s - a local classic along with the ads for Empire Carpet and Boushelle Rug Cleaning, among others.
“That old car is worth some money...”
I loved going through wrecking yards as a kid, fun stuff for car guys!
Junk yards and napa auto stores kept me on the road as a young adult. The yards seem to be making way for auto recyclers that have all of their inventory tagged and identified in a computer database that is networked with other recyclers. More efficient, but not as fun as going out with basic tools and getting it yourself. There still are the “pick-’n-pull places, but those seem more common on the west coast than on the east.
CC